


MANY MONTHS

by spicyshimmy



Category: Dragon Age
Genre: M/M, Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-08
Updated: 2012-01-08
Packaged: 2017-10-29 05:32:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,042
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/316346
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spicyshimmy/pseuds/spicyshimmy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for Syberfag on tumblr. Anders searches for warmth against harrowing thoughts--literally--and Karl gives it to him. <i>Fereldan summer has its bugs and its body odors, its restless dreams and its sticky trickles of sweat, caught like an itch between the pauldrons and the shoulder blades. The other apprentices smell more and more the closer they approach their Harrowings, and it’s impossible to connect one spell wisp to the next when Anders is too busy waving the smells away from his nose, tugging a tight collar with a crooked finger or fanning the cheeky stubble that’s only just begun to form on his chin.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	MANY MONTHS

Fereldan summer has its bugs and its body odors, its restless dreams and its sticky trickles of sweat, caught like an itch between the pauldrons and the shoulder blades. The other apprentices smell more and more the closer they approach their Harrowings, and it’s impossible to connect one spell wisp to the next when Anders is too busy waving the smells away from his nose, tugging a tight collar with a crooked finger or fanning the cheeky stubble that’s only just begun to form on his chin. 

Anders tracks its progress from Summerday to Funalis, from the end of Eluviesta all the way to the beginning of Matrinalis; he uses the high Tevene for reasons obvious but never out loud. 

He can’t decide whether he likes the prickly stuff or not and because he can’t decide, he doesn’t do anything about it. 

Fereldan summer has its pleasures and its vices. It has its pains in the arse besides; almost everything Fereldan does, especially the dogs and especially the mud and  _especially_  the templars. But it’s the Fereldan winter Anders minds most—just not for the cold of it all, not even for the chilly nights wrapped tight in a blanket some years older than he is or the heat salve they have to spread all over their toes each morning before they’re trotted out for walks and sunlight. 

Not like dogs—because Anders wouldn’t necessarily mind wearing a studded mabari collar and kaddis war paint. At least that would be interesting, if a bit too nippy for his tastes. 

What  _does_  bother him are the precautions they take against the cold: woolly socks and padding stuffed under their robes, something to stand between scrawny mage bodies and the wind that whistles in through the old stones of Kinloch Hold. 

As if it wasn’t unflattering enough the way they looked before. 

As if they couldn’t strip a few templars down and have them slap some more mortar in place. If dwarves can do it, Anders said once, how hard can it be? 

For whatever reason, no one listened, and Anders has lumpy bits where he shouldn’t while the lumpy bits he’s normally so proud of all but disappear. He can’t keep the semblance of scandal alive when he looks like an overstuffed scarecrow; when he tries, framing the words like contraband before he rises to greet the day— _Verimensis_  to  _Cassus_  and all the months in between—it falls flat on its rear, without magic, without fashion and certainly without flair. 

‘At least I’ll keep the crows away,’ he tells Mr. Wiggums. The cat on his lap is so much warmer than anything else, so much warmer than the heat salve on his toes or the padding shoved down the front of his bruise-colored robes of the acolyte. ‘ _The Crows._  If only  _they’d_  come and kidnap us—strip us down and dress us in leathers…’

‘Talking to the cat again?’ Karl asks, on his way past with an armful of misfiled books, returning each one to its sensible shelf, its  _proper place_.

Sometimes Anders mixes them up on purpose just to see Karl walk by, just to watch the shifting muscles in his shoulders as he puts those glorified doorstops away. He has to stretch to reach, low-cut robe hem skirting the crack in a sensible boot, no hint of ankle, just a flash of his wrist at the cuff when the sleeve pulls taut against the gesture. 

Karl isn’t a tall man even if he has the broad shoulders of one, and he isn’t an old man even if his hair  _is_  starting to go gray—right at the clip of his beard and the left temple, a spot he taps during lessons while Anders spends more time watching it than he does their current page. 

‘Haven’t you ever wanted to be kidnapped by the Antivan Crows,  _Enchanter_  Thekla?’ Anders asks. 

‘Not particularly,’ Karl says. 

‘And  _that’s_  why I’m talking to the cat about it,’ Anders says. ‘We’re kindred spirits. At least I know  _he_  understands me.’

‘Mister Wiggums and Mister Anders.’ Karl runs his blunt fingers down over the leather binding, a dust-mote from the top shelf settling like a kiss of white in his beard. ‘What a fine pair you make. Trust the Antivans to make a set small enough for a cat—they’re serious about their leather, aren’t they?’

‘He keeps me warm,’ Anders says. 

‘Leathers won’t,’ Karl replies. 

*

It snows at the very start of Umbralis—or  _Firstfall_ , which is what they call it in these parts and what Anders calls it everywhere other than privately. But it’s too straightforward, without any of the abstract shadows implicit in its real name.  _Umbralis_ , the word whispers back, hot against the quilt he’s pulled up to his nose as he spends more and more time postponing the inevitable  _getting out of bed_  of it all, losing every last inch of comfort he’s gathered through the long, cold night. 

After that it’s heat salve and sticky toes and chilly boots and chasing a spider he shook out of the left one, then breakfast and slim sunlight, trotted along by templars and trotted back in, and pink noses and frozen fingertips and wanting, more than anything, a good scarf to keep his chin warmer than the stubble does. Anders huffs into his palms and stamps his feet and he knows his cheeks are redder than a redblossom special, or the raw bacon that comes in before Feastday, the smell of smoked meats filling the tight halls while the apprentices are still too nervous about Harrowings to be hungry. 

Anders slides his fingers under Mister Wiggums during self-directed study, cat on one side and book on the other, until blood comes back to the tips and they stop their shaking. 

And if he gets a little bacon grease on brindly old tabby fur in the meantime, he likes to think Mister Wiggums appreciates the flavor during his next devoted session of grooming. 

It doesn’t feel like Umbralis in this place, Anders’s chin on his knee, trapped by the pull of his robes in all the wrong places. His legs are bare and chilly somewhere far beneath; the bench by the window creaks and the musty vellum crinkles yellow, the only sweet sound the thrum of Mister Wiggums chest purring and purring. 

*

The whispers start after it’s been snowing close to a full week straight, gossip as thick and heavy as the fat wet splatter against the windowpanes, the sunlight shining but only through the broad streaks of frost. Idle chatter has ever been one of the few recreational activities in a tower full of restless mages, rumors starting like little ripples at the center of a frozen lake—somewhere just beneath the ice. 

It keeps their tongues wagging and their minds warm. Anders’s blood pumps sluggish but steady at the insignificance of it all, one story feeding off the next and growing fat as the mealworms living under the barrels in the cellar. 

He loves words as much as the next man—the bigger the better—but there’s no one around with the skill to spin a proper story, one with kisses and betrayal and explosions, Orlesian sensibilities or Antivan tastes, with a pinch of Free Marches horror for good measure.

The best gossip passes through the library, living and breathing instead of dead on the page already, at the intersection between bestiaries and herbalism, a few bare paces from Mister Wiggums and Anders—the former drooling on his paws, the latter chafing his fingers against damp puffs of breath. 

It’s practically the same thing.

But there’s a difference between finding out who Petra’s been kissing—ginger as spellfire with a chin sharper than a Starkhaven arrowhead—and those other things: dire predictions and apprentice sweat and the one consistent topic that never changes, beyond the color of the smalls Senior Enchanter Wynne might or might not be wearing. 

Mister Wiggums rearranges himself over Anders’s boots beneath the table, fur on kid-leather. He yawns and yowls and Anders’s elbows are sharp against the wood edge before him, although there’s too much cotton for a proper splinter to pierce hidden skin. 

 _Chose tranquility,_  all the apprentices say, as though they really mean it—as though the choice itself makes sense to them or the choice itself is anything. Anders doesn’t even know the lad’s name and he doesn’t care to know it; he tells himself he’s grateful that it isn’t him, and that’s when he starts giggling. 

‘You think this is funny?’ Petra asks, turning her weapon-chin on him.

Anders’s fingers twitch against the corner of a page, splitting the skin at one tip.

‘I think it makes for a terrible story,’ he says. ‘Not even a daring chase or last minute escape attempt.’ 

‘This is why you don’t have any  _friends_ , Anders,’ Petra tells him, but it doesn’t pierce him the way she wants it to. It’s something he knows already, something he might have done on purpose. 

He’s clever that way. All the senior enchanters say so—with a frown or a cough of unsubtle warning, even if only one of them sees him another way, with a cat undisturbed and heavy on his thigh or napping on his feet. 

Mister Wiggums has been around long enough that he isn’t going anywhere, accepting the spiny handshake of a demon or sinking into the tar-blackened arms of a shade. His whiskers twitch once but Anders suddenly can’t reach down to pet him, those familiar grooves between his ears, those friendly white stripes on orange, because the act of touching anything implies too much, too much of it without anything more than meaning. 

*

It’s the Fereldan winter Anders minds the most—sharper cold in the middle of the night, long past curfew, the doors not thick enough to keep out the chill or the clank of armor against armor. 

Tevinter would be warm this time of year, balmy and sunny, tides against the sands and spires against the sky. The wind wouldn’t rattle the glass against the frames or laugh in through the spaces between dry masonry, stones cut to fit just right against the other stones. 

They never do—not perfectly. No one thing finds its place with another naturally or even unnaturally; it has to be forced. 

Anders can’t sleep no matter which way he turns, but he’s always been good at sneaking through hallways—for midnight snacks or to press his nose against one of the library windows, watching Lake Calenhad swallow the moon. Sometimes he follows he long bridge leading out to the water; every time he hopes to see a little boat passing across the blackness, one small lamp’s light stronger than any of the stars. 

He doesn’t go to the library but lets himself into Karl’s room instead, socked feet stinking of salves and sticky with cold sweat against the soles. When he gets to the bed Karl’s already awake, watching and waiting, one brow raised. 

‘I’m cold,’ Anders tells him, though he means so much more than that. 

‘What about Mister Wiggums?’ Karl asks. 

He could stand to look a touch more confused.

‘I’m cold,’ Anders repeats. 

It’s the truth for once and it’s not warmth that Mister Wiggums can lend him, that imagined months far beyond the Hundred Pillars can change. All the words he knows offer as much or as little as the moon on the surface of the water, just a joke, just a reflection—and he knows what he looks like, what Karl probably doesn’t want to see. 

But Karl opens the covers to him anyway, nightshirt pushed up to his knees, hairy shins and a sudden surge of heat: the comfort he’s gathered through the long, cold night. 

*

They lie together until morning, side by each, Anders keeping his fingers tucked against Karl’s body. He doesn’t shiver and when he remembers, he writes all the months in Ancient Tevinter on Karl’s chest through the fabric, only slim cotton to separate skin from skin. 

‘ _Umbralis_ ,’ Karl whispers like a secret, like dreaming, all the shadows they’ve known and the shadows they’ll never see, and he holds Anders closer, strong arm braced tight.

 **END**


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